


Every Angel is Terrifying

by Lokei



Category: Hornblower (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Poetry, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-11
Updated: 2006-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:01:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Angel is Terrifying

_From “The First Elegy” by Rainer Maria Rilke_

 _Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’  
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me  
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed  
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing  
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,  
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains  
to annihilate us. Every Angel is terrifying._

When the distant and infrequent clouds scud across the Mediterranean sky, the shadows of the bars across the window shiver on the floor, and Archie can nearly convince himself they are the shadows of the rigging on the _Indy_ vibrating in a stiff breeze. On those occasions silent tears soak the pillow as he turns away, preferring to stare sightlessly at stone than face reminders of what was lost. Those are the good days.

Other days his fists clench in the fabric of the worn pallet and his nails scrape the rough wood beneath, and his mouth shapes the screams no one can hear but himself. Even if he gave them voice, who would listen? He might once have called himself a man of faith, but the pain and shame that lurked in the cable tiers of the _Justinian_ had taught him differently long since. The only angel listening there was fallen, and to cry out to him only made the darkness danker. Better to blunt one’s nails, dug deep in the forgiving and secretive wood than to bow to that kind of terror. His mind wanders, but his body remembers. Those are the bad days.

Or perhaps they are the same, good and bad melding one into the other, he doesn’t know. What sense of time he had is left in a hole in the ground along with the remaining shreds of his belief and his will. He retains wits enough to remember what he has lost; remembers clingling helplessly, wretchedly, to the arms of the Spaniards who pulled him from the living grave, overwhelmed with piteous sobs.

He has just enough resolve to swear he will never become that again. There are no angels, and he is merely a dead man waiting to die.

But death does not come, and another arrives instead—earnest, principled, demanding and beautiful in his unbroken strength. He brings hope with him, a feeling so long alien that it is fearful, and Archie pushes him away, unwilling to see.

And when death seeks to claim him at last, the other stands in the way. Even teetering on the brink, Archie feels his defiant heartbeat when he catches him up and holds him close, insisting on life, overwhelming all protest.

The crisis passes and Archie wakes to find him sleeping, sunlight delicately brushing the long lashes, the proud brow, the impossibly long-fingered hands—all relaxed now, deceptively soft, even gentle in repose. Archie remembers vividly the determination in that brow, the fierceness in those fingers, destroying despair with the force of his words and requiring obedience.

Archie holds his breath, forbears to disturb the serenity of the moment, the almost unbearable new lightness of his soul, afraid to stir the dust-motes on the other’s lashes, to rend the beauty that cloaks the danger.

Because Archie knows he would do anything to live up to the expectations in Horatio’s waking eyes. And that is more gloriously frightening than anything else.


End file.
